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The Human Soul, next;
Everywhere we hear of it as in bitter and miserable durance in
body, a victim to troubles and desires and fears and all forms of
evil, the body its prison or its tomb, the kosmos its cave or
cavern.
Now this does not clash with the first theory [that of the
impassivity of soul as in the All]; for the descent of the human
Soul has not been due to the same causes [as that of the
All-Soul.]
All that is Intellectual-Principle has its being- whole and all-
in the place of Intellection, what we call the Intellectual
Kosmos: but there exist, too, the intellective powers included in
its being, and the separate intelligences- for the
Intellectual-Principle is not merely one; it is one and many. In
the same way there must be both many souls and one, the one being
the source of the differing many just as from one genus there
rise various species, better and worse, some of the more
intellectual order, others less effectively so.
In the Intellectual-Principle a distinction is to be made: there
is the Intellectual-Principle itself, which like some huge living
organism contains potentially all the other forms; and there are
the forms thus potentially included now realized as individuals.
We may think of it as a city which itself has soul and life, and
includes, also, other forms of life; the living city is the more
perfect and powerful, but those lesser forms, in spite of all,
share in the one same living quality: or, another illustration,
from fire, the universal, proceed both the great fire and the
minor fires; yet all have the one common essence, that of fire
the universal, or, more exactly, participate in that from which
the essence of the universal fire proceeds.
No doubt the task of the soul, in its more emphatically reasoning
phase, is intellection: but it must have another as well, or it
would be undistinguishable from the Intellectual-Principle. To
its quality of being intellective it adds the quality by which it
attains its particular manner of being: remaining, therefore, an
Intellectual-Principle, it has thenceforth its own task too, as
everything must that exists among real beings.
It looks towards its higher and has intellection; towards itself
and conserves its peculiar being; towards its lower and orders,
administers, governs.
The total of things could not have remained stationary in the
Intellectual Kosmos, once there was the possibility of continuous
variety, of beings inferior but as necessarily existent as their
superiors.
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